Low Food Prices Send Inflation Tumbling, and other stories

The ONS has created a fantasy world where this is affordable

The Office for National Statistics made its literary debut today, with the publication of a welcome collection of short works of fiction which takes its name from the first story, ‘Low Food Prices Send Inflation Tumbling’.

The eponymous tale focuses on an anonymous junior civil servant’s increasingly desperate and comical attempts to discover the location of the fabled supermarket where a loaf of bread doesn’t go up a penny a day, whilst being pursued by an ever-growing Kafkaesque horde of newspaper editors, government ministers and Bank of England officials.

Expert storyteller Nick Clegg has already hailed the collection as a masterpiece.

“The extraordinary achievement of this first-time author is that it all seems so plausible that you almost - almost - end up believing that the Consumer Price Index really has fallen from 4.4% to 4%,” he acknowledged, “Even though, of course, we all know it can’t possibly be true.”

Other acclaimed tales in the collection are as fantastically imaginative as the first, including such bizarrely tempting titles as ‘Enterprise Zones End The Misery Of Unemployment’, ‘Mr Osborne Helps The Low-Paid’ and ‘How To Get By After An Atos Medical On £0 A Day’.